It is universally acknowledged that California has a serious housing supply and affordability crisis, yet Democrats in the Legislature seem intent on increasing housings costs even more.

The state’s housing affordability numbers are pretty ugly. California housing prices are two-and-a-half times the national average, the Legislative Analyst’s Office noted in a March 2015 report. Overall homeownership rates are at their lowest since the 1940s, a January report from the California Department of Housing and Community Development report informs, and, over the past 10 years, new home construction has averaged just 80,000 of the projected 180,000 needed each year. California’s 54.6 percent homeownership rate is second-worst in the country, ahead of only New York, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Our region is the hardest hit of all, at just 46.5 percent. “The L.A.-O.C. area had the lowest homeownership rate in four out of the last five quarters among the 85 metropolitan areas tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau,” the Orange County Register reported in August.

Things aren’t any better for renters. Rents in California are 50 percent higher than the national average, the LAO study reported. And a new analysis from Forbes found that seven of the top 11 worst cities for renters came from California. San Diego trailed only Miami, followed by Manhattan, Los Angeles, Orange County, Boston and Riverside-San Bernardino. Combine all this with the fact that more than 20 percent of the population is poor, the worst of any state, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account the cost of living, and you have a recipe for disaster.

This hasn’t stopped Democratic legislators from proposing measures that would make the problem even worse, however. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, wants to mandate that all new residential and commercial buildings include solar panels covering at least 15 percent of their roofs, which would replicate a local law he successfully pushed through as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. His Senate Bill 71 will certainly add untold thousands of dollars to the price of a house or business building.

Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D-San Jose, has offered Assembly Bill 199, which would require new residential housing projects to pay prevailing wages. The Business Council of San Joaquin County estimates that this will increase the cost of a 1,500-square-foot home by $75,000.

Consider the example of Los Angeles, where voters in November passed Measure JJJ, the so-called “Affordable Housing and Labor Standards” initiative, which contains a similar prevailing wage provision. An analysis last year by Beacon Economics found that “prevailing wages are almost double the market rate wages across job classifications and will drive up total project costs 46 percent.” If AB199 passes, we can expect significant price jumps statewide as well.

Existing state and local barriers such as restrictive zoning and land-use rules, burdensome environmental and labor regulations have done enough harm to housing affordability in California. We certainly do not need to compound these errors with measures like SB71 and AB199.